"Sexuality poorly repressed unsettles some families; well repressed, it unsettles the whole world"
About this Quote
Kraus flips the usual moral panic on its head: the problem is not unruly sexuality, but a culture that gets good at stuffing it into a locked drawer. The first clause concedes the bourgeois fear that visible desire can rock a household - scandal, gossip, the fragile architecture of respectability. Then comes the knife turn. When repression becomes "well" executed, it stops being a private management issue and turns systemic: the world itself gets jittery, volatile, overcompensating.
The wit is in the double meaning of "unsettles". Poor repression produces messy, localized drama; successful repression produces a calmer surface and a more dangerous undertow. Kraus suggests that denied drives do not disappear. They mutate into institutions: obsessive propriety, punitive laws, gender policing, moral crusades, the kind of public virtue that always seems to need an enemy. "Well repressed" reads like a backhanded compliment - a society proud of its discipline is really congratulating itself for building a pressure cooker.
Context matters. Kraus wrote in fin-de-siecle Vienna, a place famous for its glossy culture and anxious sexual codes, where Freud was mapping repression as psychic technology and where nationalist and authoritarian movements were learning how to mobilize mass resentments. Kraus, the great satirist of hypocrisy, hears the same mechanism in the family and in geopolitics: what gets silenced in the bedroom returns as noise in the streets.
The wit is in the double meaning of "unsettles". Poor repression produces messy, localized drama; successful repression produces a calmer surface and a more dangerous undertow. Kraus suggests that denied drives do not disappear. They mutate into institutions: obsessive propriety, punitive laws, gender policing, moral crusades, the kind of public virtue that always seems to need an enemy. "Well repressed" reads like a backhanded compliment - a society proud of its discipline is really congratulating itself for building a pressure cooker.
Context matters. Kraus wrote in fin-de-siecle Vienna, a place famous for its glossy culture and anxious sexual codes, where Freud was mapping repression as psychic technology and where nationalist and authoritarian movements were learning how to mobilize mass resentments. Kraus, the great satirist of hypocrisy, hears the same mechanism in the family and in geopolitics: what gets silenced in the bedroom returns as noise in the streets.
Quote Details
| Topic | Freedom |
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